Originally I had posted this problem in the Newbie section but after 80 views and no responses I thought I'd try here.

I've tried installing Mandriva LE2005 and Slackware (10.1 and 10.2)and neither can properly recognize my hard drive. I am running an Athlon64 3200 on an ASUS A8N-E board with NVIDIA NForce4 and a Seagate 200GB Barracuda drive.

Mandriva hangs at the message that reads "Installing driver for hard drive controller nVidia Corporation|CK804 Serial ATA Controller" for quite some time and then eventually gives me the message "insmod'ing module sata_nv failed at /usr/bin/perl-install/modules.pm line 324"

I then get the option of trying to install something else but have no idea what I am supposed to be installing. I've tried a couple of the other SATA's in the list it provides but with no luck. I've tried using the three CD release as well as the bootable DVD with the same issue.

When I try Slackware, fdisk gives me an error trying to read the drive and only recognizes it as an IDE drive (/dev/hda) and it gets the size wrong and tells me it has the wrong number of cylinders.

The only thing that worked was Linspire 5.0.59. I ran it live off the CD and it had no problems recognizing my hard drive as a SCSI drive and even let me access my XP x64 partition immediately. I didn't want to use all of the remaining hard drive space (I have a 30GB partition for XP and the other 170 is free) so I ran fdisk in an xterm, gave myself a 4GB swap partition and a 30 GB Linux partition, rebooted and installed on the Linux partition. The installation was quick and flawless (in fact far easier than XP) but I'd still rather have the Mandriva distro installed and wouldn't mind a Slackware partition as well.

Now that I have a working install of linux, any suggestions on how to install the other distro's on my system? More importantly, why did Linspire work when Mandriva and Slack wouldn't?

Hello,

You could check wich driver Linspire uses. (using lspci command in combination with lsmod)
Then try selecting the same driver when installing the other distro's.
It's also possible that the other distro's don't have the driver for the controller (because it wasn't there yet when released). If so, then you need to use a downloaded driver, this is icky to do, because you need the kernel to be recompiled somehow before installing it. (chroot in a temp environment etc etc). in your case, i suggest staying away from all that. Better wait for new release of the distro, with the correct drivers added.

Also, there is a Mandriva forum here, so you didn't need to go to "general."

Have you checked you HD controler in the HCL? (See the buttons at the top of this page.)

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